Big profit on B.C. driver’s licences

ICBC charges $75 for a new or renewed driver’s licence, but it only costs the corporation $10 to issue the licences, B.C. Auditor General John Doyle says in a new report.

The fee is set by the provincial government, which takes all the revenue and leaves ICBC to fund licence handling costs from its insurance revenues. The licence fees added up to $36.5 million in revenue to the province in the fiscal year that ended last March.

Doyle found fees are set by the government without providing a rationale to the agencies that collect them. Some fees haven’t been revised since the 1990s, and nearly half of the 2,332 fees studied in the audit had no date recorded for when they were last revised.

Doyle recommended that government fees be explained to agencies, revised regularly and the information made “readily available to the public.”